


Why Lovecraft Was Wrong - The End of Existential Horror

by Rozilla



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Awesome Jane Foster, For Science!, Gen, Jane Foster Loves Science, Jane Foster gives a talk, Lectures, Lovecraftian, references to Lovecraft, why Lovecraft was SO wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-22 21:46:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6095060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rozilla/pseuds/Rozilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jane Foster was asked to give a lecture about Lovecraft was wrong.<br/>So she did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why Lovecraft Was Wrong - The End of Existential Horror

**Author's Note:**

> God this took forever, and a lot of re-writes, but I really wanted to write this. I actually have a huge soft spot for Lovecraft's work, but... he was still wrong.

Good evening everyone and, thank you so much for coming, and I would like to thank The Royal Society for the honour of inviting me to give this… counter lecture, with the greatest respect, to Dr Fisher’s lecture from yesterday. 

Uh… I can only imagine this will not make me very popular on Reddit. 

[Laughter]

Okay, so, I’ve been wracking my brains as to how best approach this argument honestly. I have spent hours and hours trying to get this right and, this is the best I can come up with. I won’t be able to please everyone, I can only speak honestly and from my own perspective on this. It’s partly professional and partly personal, like all the best work, so I hope I can at least get my point across as succinctly as possible. 

Here goes.

I have been pretty open on my passion for space travel, my general wide eyed optimism about our future and how we can go about it by utilising our closest contact with an alien species we have  _ ever _ had. The backlash to this came in the form of people basically bringing up one of the most influential figures of American Pulp Sci-fi. That man being H.P Lovecraft. 

The main proponent of this has been Dr Alan Fisher, who put forward the Lovecraft Hypothesis- that being that… we are, as a species, small and insignificant compared to the universe and that should make us scared. We are but one discovery away from collapsing as a civilisation, going mad as we cannot comprehend it and that discovery could well come from the vast and unforgiving universe. The next time we open a portal, it could well unleash some Eldritch horror on mankind and doom us all so… we shouldn’t do that.

Now, I get the root of this argument to an extent, but… as someone who has been studying the possibility of interstellar travel and who has actually met  _ several  _ alien races… I think this argument is… flawed. 

I guess you could call that biased, but I have evidence and experience that proves otherwise. That’s not bias, that’s an informed point of view. 

I was thinking about how I would put it across, on one of my sabbatical trips… to Asgard.

[Whoops, cheers and applause]

I know at this point I sound like I’m showing off, but… if you’d been to a few alien worlds,  _ you’d _ show off about it to. 

[Laughter]

So, there I was, notebook open on my lap, sitting and looking out of a balcony in the Citadel. I just stared at this beautiful city and stretched out into an ocean with lakes and barges flying past, the physics defying structures and even further out was a sky that glowed with millions and millions of colours and starlight and all I could think was…

Man, Lovecraft was  _ so  _ full of shit. 

[Cheering and whooping]

That’s not to say he wasn’t an amazing horror writer, he was, but his thinking was so informed by his own internalised hatred of humanity that… he was blind to how beautiful the greater universe could be. Um… I had posted a blog piece on how I don’t agree with the Lovecraft Hypothesis and someone pointed out that my Dad, the late Dr Harold Foster, had once wrote a whole paper on why Lovecraft was wrong so, yeah, it was easy to see which side of the line I was going to fall on. 

Not that I am an astrophysicist and astronomer since I was tiny and have been studying inter-dimensional bridges for over a decade or anything, no it’s because my Dad said it… I mean, I agree with my Dad, but that’s not  _ just _ because he’s my Dad. I agree as a fellow academic and as someone who has, as I keep saying, gathered enough evidence to at least  _ try _ to counteract this argument. 

Also, as a Jew, my Dad had plenty of reasons to hate Lovecraft that weren’t academic so… there’s that. 

I mean, I don’t like that Lovecraft was famously anti-semitic, but if I discounted all evidence based on their personal politics or terrible behaviour towards a whole group of people… or in Lovecraft’s case,  _ several _ groups of people, I’d never be able to use any evidence ever. Even Einstein, whilst he praised and rooted for Marie Curie against her sexist detractors, he was stealing his wife’s work and leaving her alone with their children so that he could nurture his own genius whilst leaving her’s to wither on the vine.  _ And  _ have a bunch of affairs as well. 

Think about Whitney Frost, who, by all accounts was clearly… a terrible person, responsible for many murders, but her work during the Second World War was paramount in the Allies’ victory. I’ll bet most of you wouldn’t be using the cellphones you’re using without her discoveries and inventions. I have used technology and discoveries made possible by  _ Hydra _ . As it turns out, most of us have. 

Humans are flawed and we do and think and say terrible things about each other, but we are still capable of doing great things. Just because Lovecraft was… so hostile to about three quarters of the world’s population, doesn’t mean his work has no value and that we should never show caution as we venture off planet and across space. We should, there are terrifying things out there, even leaving out the hostile aliens that rained down on New York or Greenwich or the Cod Liver Oil scare, there are so many objects that could potentially endanger the unsuspecting traveller; black holes immediately come to mind. Or Type Ia supernovae, which are essentially zombie white dwarfs that come back to life and pull matter back into themselves as they disintegrate? How about Blue Stragglers? Or Dark Flow? God, just think, Dark Flow is terrifying, although after my own experience in Greenwich, I have a feeling I know what it  _ might  _ be… and you can read about it in my book-

[Laughter and applause]

See, wasn’t going to get away without at least  _ one _ plug. Seriously,  _ Traversing Yggdrasil _ , go read it, you’ll feel much better.

[Chuckling]

But seriously, there’s plenty to be scared of. That’s all leaving aside the fact that, yeah, space is big, like  _ really _ big, please insert Douglas Adams quote here.

[Laughter]

Life is sparse out there, it is only connected by routes like Yggdrasil that are accessible by vastly complicated means that, with any luck will get  _ less _ complicated, but that’ll take decades of innovation and work. It might not happen in my lifetime or even our children’s lifetime, so, until then we are somewhat isolated but for a select few individuals. 

So, yeah, we have a lot to be fearful of.

I still don’t think that this fear will make our society crumble or make us all go mad…. because, astronomers, astrophysics and most people with a half decent telescope can tell you, we’ve known about this stuff for  _ decades _ and none of us have ‘gone mad’... I mean, some of us suffer from poor mental health, but that’s nothing to do with our discoveries. Some people  _ actually  _ brought up Erik Selvig, which is not only insulting, but hugely wrong. Dr Selvig didn’t ‘go mad’ because of his discovery. He suffered a terrible traumatic incident because someone came down and used him and  _ his  _ work against his will. That’s happened plenty of times without alien intervention  _ on our _ planet pretty recently. 

[Pause]

We know how vast it is and… it’s not incomprehensible. It’s… amazing. I am but one small part of this vast universe and that makes me, personally, feel  _ alive _ . That’s not true for everyone and I would be lying if I said I never had an existential crisis before. When I was a kid looking up with my Tasco 11RT-

[Ooooh! from the audience]

Only the best you guys [chuckles] and I was looking up and saw a star going supernova, frozen in it’s tracks, and I stared at it for hours and I thought… I am looking at the past. That star has already exploded, all the life it might have supported has gone. It’s already dead and I am essentially looking at a death that’s still ongoing. What if there were some alien civilisation there and all that it had accomplished was just… gone. 

That was frightening to me and it did make me clutch a little harder to the roof of my house for fear of.. I dunno, suddenly exploding. I talked to my Dad about it and I was really upset and he just said ‘The future hasn’t happened yet sweetheart. Our sun will not go supernova, it will become a Red Giant, expand and fry us all alive. But  _ that  _ won’t happen for billions of years and by then, either our species will have gone already or we will have found a way to preserve our legacy or even ourselves.’

[Nervous laughter]

Thanks Dad, super reassuring for a ten year old to hear.

[Laughter]

Although, I  _ was _ assured by this. I thought, well, I won’t live long enough to see this, so… yeah, okay. I’m okay. Heck, even twenty years later and witnessing the near end of the world-  _ twice _ , I’m still not afraid. What humanity has shown is that; we either fight back and win… or we fight back and lose. These are frightening options, but they are not  _ beyond our comprehension _ . We are not incapable of processing this. The notion that we’ll all ‘go mad’ is kind of insulting when you think about it. Honestly, the worst that’ll happen is we have our egos knocked down a peg, which maybe that won’t be such a bad thing. Unless we are already  _ in  _ the middle of an apocalypse, which, let’s face it, we might be again sooner or later, which even then we can still  _ process  _ it. Even if we cannot understand, say, how a lot of Asgardian technology works, we can learn in about a decade or two. It takes time but we as a species are  _ not _ beyond it. 

[Pause]

So, we come back to the foundation of Lovecraft’s writing and Dr Fisher’s thinking- the existential horror. Lovecraft’s horror was existential, it talked about, again, how we are but one wrong discovery away from madness. Speaking as someone who is the great-grandchild of Holocaust survivors… I honestly think that the whole ‘existential horror’ thing is a luxury for those of us who aren’t on the receiving end of pain, hatred and fear every day. You wonder why a lot of women don’t have these crises? Or people of colour? How it seems to be the crisis of, well, guys like Lovecraft. I have that luxury  _ now _ , but I’ve known pain and fear from being on the receiving end of someone keen to do me harm either physically or emotionally from both everyday ‘imposter syndrome’ to full on running for my life from elves with lazers.

[Laughter] 

I’m sure a lot of people here can say the same. 

[Laughter]

Whole groups of people know what it's like to cling to existence with their fingertips. I think that’s why you don’t see a lot of people buying the whole ‘existential horror’ thing from them. They know  _ existence itself  _ can be scary… I know this sounds like a stretch, but… I honestly think that this may be at the basis of why I don’t personally feel scared about the vastness of space. Call it hubris or whatever, but if there’s one thing I’m not scared of… it’s feeling small. I  _ know  _ I am small, both cosmically and… physically. I don’t have to feel it, I just have to try and stand next to anyone over five foot three. 

[Laughter]

Or my giant boyfriend and his giant friends.

[Cheering and whooping]

Speaking of Thor… I asked him if Asgard is familiar with this kind of thing, the existential crisis, and he just said that his people have always known about the vastness of powers in the universe and what “unknowable” things there might be in there… but Asgard takes the policy of either trying to understand it, or leaving it well alone. They are no more scared of what may lie beyond space and time than I am of tigers in Bengal. I know they are there and they could be dangerous to me, so I don’t go near them or poke them with sticks to make them angry…. but I could ask experts, ask people who do those things safely and find out any information I might need… and still stay the hell away and don’t make them angry.

[Laughter]

If that makes sense? Basically, if and, let’s face it, it’s very likely, there are some cosmic horrors out there, if there really is a Yuggoth or a Yog-Sothoth… yeah I’ve read lots of Lovecraft. I was a lonely physics nerd and my parents forbade me to read him so…

[Laughter]

My Mom called him a giant myopic asshole so…

[Laughter]

You don’t even wanna know what my Dad called him… well, you can find out obviously, but… if your mind can handle it…

[Laughter]

Anyway... if something like them is out there, our best bet is to see if they  _ are _ there and if appropriate, leave them alone. Send out probes, listen to any potential allies or information already gathered and decide whether it is worth our while, our lives, to explore it. I may be pretty brave, or stupid according to my assistant, but I am not without a good amount of caution. What I am saying is that we should leave anything potentially dangerous well enough alone, until we  _ can _ deal with it. The only way we can deal with it, if we even need to, is to learn and discover. 

We can certainly, as I keep saying, learn from our nearest neighbours- the ones who have protected us from giant alien menaces before we even invented the printing press.

We don’t have to worship them as gods any more, we can now trade ideas and work with them. There is now a mid-point, a middle ground, between us and Azathoth so… I think we’re okay.

[Laughter]

[Cough]

I hope I’ve not rambled on too long, but… the long and the short of it is this- we know there’s already dangerous, vast, objects and species out there, we have seen them, I have seen them and we are small in the face of them. But we couldn’t shrink back and crawl back to our Islands of Ignorance even if we wanted to. The veil was lifted the minute we were attacked in New York and our only option is to move forward. We will not go mad, given the right tools and the right mentality, we can change and grow as a species… or we risk basically crawling in on ourselves. That, to me, is way more terrifying.

Thank you very much.

[Applause]


End file.
